The answer has ranged from spirits to pranksters. For over 100 years scientists have attributed this movement to the ideometer effect, referring to unintentional small muscle movements occurring outside of conscious control. At the UBC Visual Cognition Lab, engineering, computer science and psychology have joined forces to see if the movements of a Ouija Board can tell us something about our non-conscious mind.

Dr. Sid Fels of ECE with Dr. Ron Rensink (Computer Science and Psychology) and PostDoc Hélén Gauchou (Psychology) have conducted a number of experiments using the Ouija Board that demonstrate how clever implicit cognition (the non-conscious mind) really is. In one experiment people were asked a number of yes or no, fact based questions, with and without the Ouija Board. When asked to use the Ouija Board to answer questions participants were told they were moving the planchette or pointer with a person sitting in another room. In fact, Dr. Fels had designed a robot that mimiced and amplify the participant's movements. Answering the questions verbally people got about 50% of the questions right, but with a Ouija Board they got 65% of the questions right.

These results were replicated in a second study. In this experiment participants sat down to the Ouija Board with a confederate and then were blindfolded. The confederate quickly removed their hands from the planchette. Once again, the responses in the Ouija Board condition, when particpants did not think they were in conscious control, were much better.

Fels, Rensink and Gauchou's research not only helps explain how the Ouija Board works, it also demonstrates how the Ouija Board can be useful in examining implicit cognition. “Now that we have some hypotheses in terms of what’s going on here, accessing knowledge and cognitive abilities that you don’t have conscious awareness of, [the Ouija board] would be an instrument to actually get at that,” Fels explains. “Now we can start using it to ask other types of questions."

So far, the researchers have donated their time to this project. The results demonstrate a real usefulness in the technique and so the Visual Cognition Lab is pursuing crowd sourced funding for the project.

In an interview with Linda Rodriguez McRobbie, Dr. Rensink named a few of the directions this research can take, for example, "how much and what the non-conscious mind knows, how fast it can learn, how it remembers, even how it amuses itself, if it does... if there are two or more systems of information processes, which system is more impacted by neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s?"